


flights of angels

by hephaest1on



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Crack, Hand Jobs, M/M, Oral Sex, Virgin Spock, i hate that theres a tag for that and i hate even more the fact that i'm using it, spoilers for the 1982 masterpiece animated musical the last unicorn, star trek tos but its the 1982 masterpiece animated musical the last unicorn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 03:06:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15787677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hephaest1on/pseuds/hephaest1on
Summary: im not gonna lie to you its a last unicorn spirk au im just not gonna lie to you





	flights of angels

**Author's Note:**

> only appropriate soundtrack for this  
> http://bassiter.tumblr.com/post/176534083134/clair-de-lune-by-claude-debussy-except-youre  
> https://open.spotify.com/track/7J2zDMIhcCY5wFOpe4Ky2s  
> 

He might as well have been the sun. 

The dreams that night are full of voices: yelling, screeching voices he does not recognize, save perhaps one. Burnt flesh, metal, and the smell of blood, things that have no place in his memory but feel real all the same. And burning.

There is something burning. He is sure of it, he can taste it, filling his throat with the smoke, and licking at his back. But there is nothing there but mattress, nothing but a sheet coiled around him so strangely he believes he must have made it so as he slept. The only voice is of someone in the hallway, too smooth to belong to the doctor - who he now recognizes as the familiar figure in the dream - but a voice. 

The only thing he takes with him is the blanket he woke tangled in, like some dark cocoon that preserved him, or perhaps his need to escape the confines of that room was too insistent for him to consider leaving it in favor of more suitable clothing. Either way, he holds it tight against his chest as it whips lazily in the sea breeze that rushes through the halls and throws the waves that peninsula him through the wide window cut from the rock outside his room.

He might still be asleep, he thinks, and is struck with a sudden image of being carried over the low windowsill by a gust of wind. His compromise is then to simply stand back from it, shaking, legs hardly seeming to support him, still inhaling the sudden freshness of the air through that small patch of a wide-open sky that fills him with a vague anxiety. Perhaps it was all he should ask for, that it be cold.

He forgets there was someone already awake, subsequently seems to forget his own name.

“Excuse me?”

From the corridor to his side has emerged that other man here, the prince of this castle, he recalls, though he doesn’t remember his name and the image of his face might as well be entirely new. This of course, made no sense at all. since he was almost certain he would have met this prince upon his arrival with the doctor and Saavik nearly forty-two days ago, and run into him otherwise at least three other times. But this castle was large, with intricate, twisting corridors, and perhaps he could be wrong.

The fire.

“Kirk. It’s Kirk. I’m sorry, I must have failed to introduce myself.”

He turns back to the window. There is nothing else to do. Dark circles begin to appear on the stone at his feet, and it’s raining, a grey, irregular drizzle that is all but lost to the steady surging of the water below.

"I will not trouble you." He says.

"Trouble me, please." Kirk says, the carefully calculated diplomacy no longer in his voice. There is a slip of parchment in his hand, something hastily written on it, but Kirk seems to notice him looking at it, because he gathers it in his fingers and crushes it, still holding it down at his side as if it were nothing.

“Why are you awake, Kirk?” Kirk smiles, folds his arms behind him, joins him at the window.

“I would, actually prefer if you called me Jim. That’s my...actual name. Sorry for confusing you.”

“You didn’t confuse me.”

“Well.”

"Why are you awake, Jim?”

“I wished to run into you.” 

“Why should you wish that?” He realizes if he stares at the sea long enough, the smoke seems to rise back in his lungs. An interesting discovery - perhaps he should ask the doctor if he was getting sick, though he doesn’t believe he could possibly.

“To tell you the truth,” He hears Kirk say, much quieter now. “You are the most fascinating thing to show their face in this castle since I dropped, and I’m not exactly something, either. I wish you needed or even wanted...something from me. I’ve been trying to show you that since I first saw you. Anything."

The burning tears at his back. Anything. It seems to be getting worse.

He grips the sheet tight in his hands. If anything, could you help me. Throw water on me, something. Smother it out.

He touches his forehead, the action itself seeming wrong, and the heat creeps up his spine and stings at his hands and feet, and the scar at his forehead, which he believes to be the source of the incessant headaches, and perhaps the dreams. He hates it, whatever it is, wishes it was gone with a human passion that drives him to admit to it beyond his volition.

"I’m speaking out of line, aren’t I?”

“It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t know what it is.”

“What is?”

“Whatever so desperately wants me to remember it. Whatever I keep dreaming about.”

"You have bad dreams?" The prince says, his voice more steady, as if he is calculating now what possible way he could have of remedying that. "I had nightmares for most of my life. I couldn’t tell you how they faded out, I wish I could."

"They’re not just dreams.” He shakes his head, and his eyes are glued to that steady writhing of the sea, as if all of its creatures were thrashing about in the water just underneath the surface. “It’s this burning sensation. And the things I see are things I don’t remember ever happening, it’s the most ridiculous, illogical - "

“I don’t think it is.”

“It feels like someone is holding a torch to my back.”

"Nothing may hurt you here. My father will not permit it, and neither will I." 

The prince Kirk has hair like wheat, though he doesn’t remember ever seeing wheat in his life it is like wheat, made golden by the sunlight, and while some effort has been given to push and cut it from around his face, a lock of it slips down onto his forehead, and he thinks of the scar at his own, and it begins to ache once more. His eyes are sweet and hazel, and all at once he realizes he would maybe like to reach out with his hands and touch all the soft planes of his face, though before tonight he would never imagined it.

"Then do not let me sleep. Stay with me, if I sleep in the morning, I know it won’t happen. If you wish i wanted something of you, then take this. Help me be rid of them."

"Like a starving man in a desert."

Kirk lays his hand over his at the stone of the window, and turns him away from the pounding of the sea with both clasped on either side. The firmness of it catches him off guard, he forgets this is a man who slays dragons, rides horseback to the ends of the earth.

"Then if we are to spend this time together, let's not spend it somewhere so sad."

"Can the sea feel sadness?"

"Don't you think it would explain a few things?" The prince smiles, darts his mouth to the back of the white hand held tightly in his, and leads him away. And, for a moment, the burning creeps back into itself.

They pass through the hallways in silence, Kirk’s footsteps the only echo off the rough stone, the sound of the sea below only a distant roar. It is apparent he is leading them somewhere in particular, but not somewhere he tells of. The circulation seems to start again in his legs, as they move, which is a small but welcome comfort.

He feels that it will be the prince's own quarters that they will go to, for where else, but as he turns again there is a staircase that winds tight against the wall and he knows they are in the very highest tower of the King's labyrinth, as the end of the staircase opens onto a room with a writing table, and doors onto a balcony, ornately carved wood adorning the four-posted bed and the chairs and table.

Kirk steps forward, searching for something at the table, and suddenly the room is warm and glowing, springing into multiplied degrees of such as he moves around the room, touching a candle to each of the candlesticks scattered around on various surfaces.

He moves towards the table, and his foot brushes something, another crumpled paper that he lifts and smooths out in his hands, not knowing what he expects.

"Don't read those, please." Kirk calls from across the room and he drops it again, only having caught sight of a phrase or two, my sweet prince, and stiffens in anticipation of his anger.

"None of them are any good, is all. I should throw them out." He moves close again, returning the dripping candlestick to its original place on the table's edge. He looks down, kicking a few of the balled-up pages into a small pile around a leg of the chair, and presses his lips into a smile, reaching over for the one now sitting unfurled between them.

"I didn't even write this, I stole it." He says, and lets it flutter from his hand down to the floor. He looks down, and laughs, as he opens and crumples more pages strewn about the table. 

"Where did you steal it from?"

"A true poet." He beams up at him, despite him only looking down in response. "You don't ever smile, do you?"

"You smile with so little provocation. Furthermore, I am not a prince.”

"You learn to smile in a place like this. And I find that hard to believe." Kirk says, then leaves him still standing against the table, lowering himself at the side of his bed to face him. "Will you tell me about the dreams?"

"Please don't ask that of me."

"Then ask something of me. Let me please you in some way, it's all I wish."

"For me to trouble you."

"It’s no trouble."

He steps once towards the prince, but no more.

"Tell me why I feel that I’m missing some important part of myself. Tell me how to be rid of it, if you know how."

"I could try to."

"Then try.”

Kirk doesn't speak outright, but looks forward at him for a long stretch of time, before straightening up and locking their eyes together. "Come closer then" he might have opened his mouth to whisper, but he could have imagined so, only out of desire to - something about that desire shames him, but only for a moment.

The smile that touches the prince's face when he obliges, stepping within inches of his knees, could be the sun itself, rising from its hibernation beyond the water. He thinks the sun shouldn't be an arms length away, almost tests that, but holds both arms still at his chest, bunching the fabric tight in one fist.

"Your highness."

“You’re tense. Would you prefer we go somewhere else?”

"I will continue to be at your service."

"You have it backwards." The smile, again, he thinks it could render him unconscious in the right light, however little sense that makes, and it calls him forward, now guided with a rough but gentle hand on the back of one leg. The warm, smiling mouth hits the folds of his blanket, pressing into the flat of his stomach calm, composed phrases. "I'm the one who wishes to serve you. You only must trust me to do so."

His entire body seems to tighten at that, ensuring he is even less prepared for both of the strong hands to move up at the start of his thigh, curving to his waist, hitching the blanket up a minute amount, but not enough for anything. He knows now that there was no sense in leaving his bed without dressing - but how would he know he would be caught, like this? Like some fantastic beast in a cage, for him to look at, to touch, but he doesn't think he feels trapped at all. The feeling does bear some resemblance to it, but it doesn't fill him with anxiety as he may have expected.

"Do you?"

"Yes."

The two hands move away, but only to his legs again, and well, then it is a wonderful way to be trapped, his hands pressed against the skin enough to slip underneath the cocoon of fabric, head twisting to kiss the crest of bone in the middle of his chest, under his own hands. The hands against the skin where he cant see them causes him to shiver, and he regrets it, when the warm, light voice mocks him by asking sweetly if he's cold, with both hands at the base of his spine. 

"The sheets on that bed you use aren't thick at all, and the nights can be so cold way out here from the wind." 

"Would you have some way to remedy that?" He hears himself say without thinking, mind possessed with the question of Kirk’s strange carefulness of him, even the grip at his back pulling him forward into the prince's chest is gentle, though tactless, their legs bumping together as they accommodate one another. Without thinking, he places one hand at Kirk's, and the prince takes full advantage of the way that action loosed a part of his blanket cloak, pressing his face into an exposed shoulder, the tip of his nose pushing at the hollow of it and spreading warm breath across the skin.

"Will you sleep here, instead?"

"If you...wish me to." He barely speaks before the hands release him and grasp at the one hand still holding the blanket around him. Pressing at his knuckles, there is something urging about it, something terribly urgent.

"I don't know that..." He begins, distracting himself with the ornaments on the princes chest, small badges and trinkets that don't seem to mean anything at all, and the hard metal fastenings that run down to his waist. As he averts his attention from the questioning look, he toys with the first clasp, sliding it open to cut a line of flesh down the center of him. Nothing is changed by it. The room does not burst into flames. He does not know if that should come as a relief.

"If you wish, I won't touch you."

For the second time that night, his mind goes blank.

"Why is it that men have such a propensity for the phrase ‘if you wish’ ? "

“Some poet said it once and we all went crazy for it.”

“How ridiculous you all are.”

"Well." Something flashes in his eyes. "I suppose I could humor your cynicality." He says in a burst of passion, and suddenly he is on his feet, still, always smiling, and pulls them flush together. “If you wish me to, that is.” The tightness he once felt flashes like fire through him as the two hands find his face and their lips are colliding together.

He inhales only to taste Kirk's breath, and finds his mouth open under his, his head now free, the instruments that seem to have commanded all his latest moves sliding down the ridges of his back, gripping him against his still-fully-clothed hip and eliciting a gasp before he can think to stop it. He cannot find it in himself to do much of anything but seek again his mouth, which Kirk is very much eager to comply with.

"Lay down." He whirls them around so that he is urged to fall back, but when he does, it is with his arms lowering them both to it, and he is only dimly aware of bracing his descent with both arms. Kirk has the clasps off of his tunic and has left it on the nearby chair before he can think, but as he turns and looks back to the foot of the bed, it flashes in his mind what he will do, though he doesn't imagine he will contest that. Perhaps it would bother him under normal conditions, but he finds he trusts him, in a way he doesn't suppose he was ever meant to, enough not to mind it. In fact, he doesn’t think he minds Kirk at all, even with his strange mannerisms and dramatic proclivities.

When Kirk kneels on the bed under him, and places a hand on his throat, it is just another mannerism to him. When he moves to touch his collarbone, fingers curling through the shadow of dark hair that draws a line down his torso, it is perhaps a bit more to think about. When his palm drives through the twisted sheet still encircling him, pushing each side far across the expanse of the heavy quilt they have perched upon, it is certainly...something more complex than a mannerism. He will have to think about it.

Without preface, Kirk is over him, his curled, shining hair coming down to tease at his chest as he leads his mouth all over him, seeming perfectly insistent upon tasting every inch of his skin. When his face is suddenly level with his again, nosing into his jaw, he feels the rough press of Kirk's thigh again between his legs, and almost misses the coarse whispering of his voice against his ear. 

Those eyes once again captivate him as Kirk readjusts and pushes himself down to the foot of the bed with one slick motion. Furthermore, how he doesn't break contact, his arms moving around him, hooking underneath both of his knees and pulling them up and far apart. Putting aside his eyes, this effectively eliminates any remaining denial at the state he is in, in multiple senses. A few basic truths: Kirk is the only thing in his mind. Kirk touching him is the only thing in his mind. This tension has manifested in nearly unbearable, aching hardness under Kirk's hand, which covers the length of his cock in a curious, gentle way, and only exasperates his need for attention.

His hips twitch upward into that grasp, and Kirk's mouth is again on the inside of his leg, keeping a watchful eye forward as his index presses carefully at the tip of it, then circles it. Kirk doesn't linger on it long before releasing and leaning forward instead, and when he opens his mouth to say something he isn't certain of, it only comes out as a choked, desperate gasp.

Kirk 's mouth is gone, and he looks up with some nervousness in his expression, but soon ducks back down, the hot, damp cavern of his mouth opening around him once again.

He is afraid it amuses Kirk, and makes a fruitless effort to hold himself back from pushing his hips into Kirk's face, who drags the flat of his tongue up his shaft and tests the slit at its end with the very tip and makes him feel like he might faint. But when his arms slip forward under the small of his back, he is pulled forward as well, Kirk rocking him forward as he seems to hollow his cheeks and, with effort, takes him further into his mouth, tongue outstretched and leaving a sheen of saliva over the flushed skin. 

"-Kirk-"

"Jim," he is detached long enough to point out, before returning with a slight smile.

"Jim." He can barely hear himself say, the feeling of his tongue moving over the ridge of his cock a much more pressing object in his mind than whatever he had been meaning to say. And yes, he had known that. He had told him his name, he had, when they had first arrived and he had been sick and Jim had told him about satin and offered his help with whatever he needed. He had introduced himself then, smiling that calm, effortless smile, the tip of his nose and his cheeks burned red from the sun and shining with perspiration like the waves all the way out at the horizon at dusk. How did he forget?

"Yes?" 

"I-" He resents the sound that comes out of his mouth instead of words, but K-Jim lowers his mouth again just over the head and sucks at it with a force that brings the hard, press of heat back in what seems to be the very core of himself, as if a small fire has now sparked to life and is eating him from both inside and out. This causes Jim to release him, of course, and look up at him again as if he's done something harmful.

"Please-" he doesn't know what it is, but that he needs it, that Jim is the only one that can offer it, that, as obscene as it may be, his lips and tongue moving over his cock, accepting the involuntary push of his hips more brutally against the roof of his mouth, is a dream. He thinks there should be a tapestry of his head and arms, the beautiful curve of collarbone formed from his hunched shoulders keeping him upright. Jim locks both arms around his legs, holds them wide apart under his shoulders, and begins to set a rhythm at it, while grasping up at his hands, his chest, his mouth, which emits more soft noises of insistence as he quickens his pace, eyebrows knitted in concentration.

The knotting of his nerves together in the pit of his stomach reaches a fever rate, and his hand shoots out to land over Jim's forehead and push him away, which happens this time with much more reluctance, and a vacant, unsure look, his face flushed and lips parted.

They might have a whole exchange just in looks back and forth, ending with the slowest possible removal of hand from head, which Jim clenches in one of his to their side, and returns his lips to bump gently against the almost painfully sensitive shaft still standing up before him.

Without breaking eye contact, Jim brings his other hand to the base of it, stroking gently up in unison with his mouth, carefully encircling the head but not returning to the speed he once kept, working slowly up to something that comes like cresting a mountain, only to plummet down the other side.

In a violently shivering haze, he sees Jim hold himself back from the buck of his hips upwards, a moment’s reaction, the corner of his mouth streaked in milky white - the image of him promptly reopening his mouth again is his last sight before letting his eyes drift closed. Jim continues to work him into a delirium, the feverish insistence like some feral thing in his mind finally being satiated in conjunction with this release that Jim appears to find great interest in.

When he exhausts this effort, there is a stretch of seconds where his only knowledge of Jim is through his legs, still planted against the prince’s steadily rising and falling sides. His fingers touch the inside of his thigh, run up to his hip and skip across the skin of his ribcage, and then pull away, and he despairs at the loss of contact.

Jim sits on the bed next to him, legs open, staring at the window. He expects him to undress, but he doesn't, only sits there, leaning against his arms and breathing in and out, as if in a trance, his lips wet and opalescent. 

He rolls to his side, to face him completely, and reaches for his thigh, fingers stretched to brush the fabric between his hips.

"Just wait a minute." Kirk brushes his hand away, and for a second he feels annoyance, as if this were another heroism, another whimsical, desperate attempt to impress him.

He pulls himself onto his elbows, dragging himself before the prince, his prince, half the blanket still tangled around his legs like a white tail, then gestures away. Kirk lifts his legs to the side of them and obeys, knocking the remainder of his vestment unceremoniously to the floor, the belt landing with a clatter, and turns back to him, so sure of himself, so unnerved, perhaps only surprised. He crawls again between his legs and sets his forehead against the soft flesh of his stomach, and closes his hand softly around the warm length of his cock like he had seen him do minutes before. It is nonetheless securing when one of his own hands moves in with his own, fingers fitting around his, and guides him along, pulling up and down slowly.

"You don't have to do this," Jim tells him softly, voice deep with a slight strain, but that hand rises suddenly to comb through his hair, his nails sliding through the thick black as if through water, and he rises up to him, steadying his legs beneath him and angling himself more gently against Kirk - Jim's shoulders, still moving his hand. “I only wanted to-”

He looks up at Jim, and the thought trails away, the honey eyes flitting to the palm he raises to his mouth, which he gracelessly spits into before closing his hand around his cock once more, stroking it with a steady rhythm. When Jim gestures his face upwards to kiss him, it is with a vocal gasp that preempts his entire body going rigid, his mouth unable to connect properly, but making the valiant effort anyways.

His stomach is covered in his fluid: warm, thick, Jim reaches out and smears it across his skin, lifts his fingers and places them against his lips, smiling as he opens his mouth to oblige him. Jim looks at him as if something about him is very curious, his existence unexplainable. As he sits there and allows him to, the human trails his fingers across his arms and his neck, running smoothly across the protrusion of bone. Perhaps he wouldn’t debate him. Perhaps he was just as confused by it.

"This doesn't feel right." He says, and concern grows on Jim's face.

"In general, I mean. Do you as well feel that way sometimes? That you do not belong in your own body, that it is all some kind of illusion?"

He doesn't say anything, but watches him for a second, before disentangling to step off the bed, his golden-white skin shining in the light of the far window as he moves around the room to extinguish each candle.

"What am I?"

He turns, smiling now, leaning against the wall as he places down a smoking candlestick on a shelf fastened into the stone.

"You certainly appear to be a man, or some derivative of one. I am inclined to believe that, if it pleases you."

"It pleases me." 

He goes to the archway now, all blue in the light from it, and he doesn't imagine the sudden set in his jaw when he looks out into the night is coincidental.

"That's it, then. I don’t think you’re missing anything at all, if it helps you." He says with such firm conviction it only dulls the responding quip.

"In which case your father may not enjoy to hear of our arrangement."

"He has no authority over my wishes. Or my decisions. Open, or closed?" He turns to ask, holding one of the wooden shutters halfway over the window. He asks for it to be closed, and he pulls both towards eachother with a squeaking of hinges, locking them together as he continues to speak. "For that matter, he isn't even my real father. You wonder why he calls me Kirk."

"And your real father?"

"My real father died when I was much younger. I didn't talk for a very long time after he decided to take me in, so he had called me after my father. He knew whose son I was. I don't know why I kept it from him, that I had another name, but I did."

"Alright."

The steeliness of his expression softens into concern, what he is growing to understand to be affection, when he returns to the bed.

“You’ll be sick if you don’t stay warm.”

“I do not feel cold.”

“You’re shaking.” This time Jim doesn’t attempt to mock him, but reaches to the corner of the bed and pulls the heavy quilt aside and up to where he sits with his legs folded beneath him. “I saw the sun from the window, you could sleep now, if you wanted.”

He lowers himself in the space indicated, or, more accurately, falls on his face in the pillows, the relief in his body running up every individual bone. He thinks he hears Jim say he’s not going anywhere, and might feel the press of his lips against the bone of his shoulder, but it bleeds into morning so easily he could have dreamed the entire interaction.

He wakes up on his back, in the middle of a bed that is not his own, this quilt tucked around his chest. There is a bad taste in his mouth, but nothing more startling to indicate he did anything more than sleep all night.

He moves his shoulder, and a hand comes out before him, white and strung with tendons and bone in long lines and angles, then pushes down the quilt before him and remembers the human body there, the length of his chest, however, spotlessly clean. The memory of the previous night would be incongruent with this, but as he passes a hand over the skin and finds no stain, he may find in his mind some hazy picture of Kirk’s hand pressing at his side to turn him, then the damp warmth of a cloth and the steady fingers beneath it, running down his torso to clear dry saliva and semen, gently slipping between his legs to remove even the spit dried against their insides. What feels like a dry sheet covers him next, and his voice whispers somewhere above him, a feeling of complete warmth, and that is all.

Kirk, or Jim or whatever he is to him at this point, emerges from behind the table across the room, with his hands full of crumpled paper, and he hears the crinkling sound of him trying to wad it all together in one arm in order to open the window with the other. He sits up and watches him as he walks out into the sunlight and releases his armload into the wind, resulting in them blowing back into his face before being lost to the air and the sea below.

“Did you finish your poem?” He calls to Jim as he turns back to the room, a look of resigned exhaustion on his face. He still manages to smile, face lighting up as if he had not stayed awake for hours and hours.

“I think so. What did you think of it?”

He has to look down, the corners of his mouth pulling up against his better judgement. Perhaps it was the contagion of Jim’s own reckless beaming having an affect on him.

“I knew you lied to me.”

“I don’t lie. I found it quite interesting. Definitely an original work.”

“Thank you. “ He says.

“I didn’t dream.”

“I’m glad.”

“I don’t think I’ll dream ever again.”

“Not even good dreams?”

“I don’t believe I’ve had a good dream.”

He joins him again on the bed, wringing his hands between his thighs.

“Do you suppose it worked? I watched you, you barely stirred the whole time.” He look up with some hope in his expression, unabashedly human, with all of his emotions spread out for all to see. “Should we continue this...experiment, given the satisfactory results?”

“I would not mind if we did, if it’s no trouble” he spreads his own hands out on the quilt over his thighs, and as he looks down at them, another creeps atop them from across the bed, gripping his fingers softly and running the side of his thumb across his knuckles. 

“You could never trouble me. Don’t you know that?”

He thinks perhaps he does. He also doesn’t believe that Jim would ever lie to him, not as long as he lived, though before this day he hadn’t known his face. Though maybe he did, at least he feels that he mustv’e, for why else would nothing ever burn around him.

He dreams of Jim often, and he hasn’t felt fire in years. Once he wished to die with him, and would have, too. Now he knows all men are slated to die from the start, to turn back to the soil and the sea, like the creatures of the forest often do and like the old king when they sent the castle they had lived in together crashing down and with it the deal they had made to extinguish the dreams driving them both mad.

Perhaps he should have let the prince die then, a man in love, perhaps it would have troubled him less to believe he was still in love with a man, not left stunned and unfulfilled in the aftermath of his return from death and the return of the world’s unicorns from the sea. Not flat on his stomach in the sand and the ruins of his life, held steady on either side by a witch doctor and a vagabond, a hero stripped of an appropriate end, left with a weightless promise of remembrance and a bad taste in his mouth and an image of a hazy streak of black hair like water.

It is the least he can do to dream of him, writing poetry he never publishes, riding out to the ends of the earth farther than any man before him, deep into forests that stay still and green even in the dead of winter. His wayward golden hair is now cut so short it curls dark against the back of his neck, his face lined from disappointment and longing, hands so often at the reigns of his horse that they are still strong and calloused as they were years ago, and he follows ivory creatures with wings, and ones with scorpion tails and bodies larger than small villages. He follows the magical creatures of the land, daring to hope that these things are all interconnected and will lead him eventually in the direction of something he will search for until the day he falls out of even the realm of dreams, finally borne away by the same sort of creature, leaving in his place nothing but a sunspot on the mind.

Perhaps for everything, he had earned that much.

**Author's Note:**

> you ever say to your girlfriend once hey lets watch the last unicorn and pretend its star trek itll be fun and then its////////suddenly a month later.........and you have thousands of words of lady amalthea spock getting blown on your google drive and youre just/................sitting there........your real writing projects lying buried under..........thousands of words of lady amalthea spock getting blown....


End file.
